Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (review)

Scatology's not a topic often broached by literary scholars or by art historians of the early modern period, though it's clear, from this collection, that early modern European (medical) scientists and satirists examined and exploited excretory bodily functions for all the meanings that could be derived from them. This collection of essays, focusing primarily on French, German, and English early modern visual and literary culture, aims to showcase just how prevalent, explicit, and voluble the discourse on emissions of bodily waste was.

The editors do an excellent job of situating their study in the context of anthropological work on the subject of dirt, or matter out of place, as Mary Douglas famously put it, and its definitions and perceived dangers; likewise, they follow in the footsteps of Mikhail Bakhtin, Peter Stallybrass, and Allon White in their efforts to focus on the "grotesque" body and its carnivalesque and subversive symbolic functions. Finally, too, they invoke Norbert Elias's "civilizing process" to understand the specificities of a shift in Europe away from the frank acknowledgment and discussion of human wastes to a courtly and then bourgeois habitus that eliminated elimination from the social scene. One of the (perhaps) accidental byproducts of the civilizational discourse here is to demonstrate that what was once an intranational European class distinction becomes instead, in modernity, an implicit discourse about the West versus "the rest." For this reason alone it might have been useful to include studies of geographic regions other than Western Europe, from the Mediterranean basin to Africa and the East, for then at least we might have been able to chart some of the modern temporal mystifications of human waste that posit premodern filth, early-to-mid-modern class differences, and a modern "now almost universal Western 'fecal habitus,' ultimately depriving dirt of its utility as a class distinction" (xvi).

The collection is ordered chronologically, beginning with studies of classical and neoclassical precedents for the use of excretory tropes. The bulk of the collection deals with French examples of scatology (in novelistic prose, religious discourse, short stories, poetry, and political discourse). There is an essay on early modern Germany and the medieval literary and scientific antecedents for Luther's scatological rhetoric; a study of scatology in the context of the Renaissance anatomy of Folly; an essay about Dürer's and Bruegel's visual portrayals of vomiting, defecation, and urination in images of peasant festivals; and, finally, for England, articles on Marlowe's Tamburlaine and English Cavalier verse.

Many of the essays work on the intersections between literature and science, revealing a desire to address interdisciplinarily the cultural production and representation of discourses of human waste through the use of what was, arguably, one of the dominant discourses of the day — the literary and/or the visual — alongside one that was marginal, because as yet emergent — the medical/scientific. It would seem then that the modern-day hegemony of medico-scientific discourses of the human enables, in collections such as Fecal Matters, a renewed consideration in literature and the visual arts of those aspects of the body most effaced in academic humanist endeavor, among them the elimination of waste.

Given that many contributors argue authorial and textual fascination with excremental matters as a result of developments in science and scientific discourses about the body, and that they also attribute symbolic and allegorical purposes to the scatological, what emerges for me is a sense of the similarities rather than the differences between then and now, both with regard to the complementarity between developments in the larger culture and textually specific discourses and with regard to the uses to which these discourses are put and the genres within which they appear. Thus the sense that the editors have of early modern difference from the present seems, at times, somewhat overstressed; similarities...